Canadian Heritage committee  Foreign competitors such as Netflix, Google TV, Apple TV, and Hulu have internationally known brands, sophisticated technologies, marketing expertise, and very, very deep pockets. These foreign content providers remain exempt from regulation under the CRTC's new media exemption order.

Canadian Heritage committee  Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am Peter Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications Inc. I am joined by Ken Stein, senior vice-president of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs at Shaw Communications, Charlotte Bell, vice-president of Regulatory Affairs at Shaw Media and Michael Ferras, vice-president of Regulatory Affairs at Shaw Communications.

Canadian Heritage committee  Somebody would fill the void. Most of the programming they carry is American programming.

Canadian Heritage committee  At our last appearance before the commission we recommended that they in fact lift those restrictions in consideration of the plight broadcasters were expressing to the CRTC, and eliminate some of their costs as well—the part II fees. I think the chairman was here. He talked about lifting the limitation on advertising drugs—or pharmaceuticals, actually.

Canadian Heritage committee  If they went out of business?

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, I don't think so. I think someone would fill the void. In fact, if you look at CHCH in Hamilton, the local management there have a lot more confidence in the power of generating revenue from the local community than their actual corporate people do. They think if they bought that television station, they could actually make a go of it.

Canadian Heritage committee  Or Montreal.

Canadian Heritage committee  We are partners, just to be really clear. We carry all of CTV's specialty services, so we meet with them all the time. We're constantly in negotiations with them on the rates of those specialty services. They talk to us every week when they provide us with the list of services they want to have substituted, as a part of the simultaneous substitution.

Canadian Heritage committee  We're trying to get away from the sky is falling scenarios. We're proud of what we contribute in the form of local programming in all of our communities. So that would not impact the programming we deliver in our community programming. What it will do, though, is mean less money we can invest in our infrastructure to buy, for instance, a new satellite to launch more services, like the Windsor service, on that satellite.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll start off with what our contribution to local programming is, and we'll use Winnipeg as an example. We have a lot to contribute and we could contribute a lot more to local programming. We are the local programming in many small communities across Canada where there is no CTV.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much. Just so you know, we've dropped from the 50 channels on pay-per-view that we used to have on Star Choice to fewer than five. So we're using that as a way of adding more services.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, clearly, the fee for carriage is a cost to us, and that would be a cost we'd pass on to our customers. Our customers, for that fee for carriage, are going to get what? Nothing--nothing they don't have now.

Canadian Heritage committee  The answer is no, we don't agree with that. I think the suggestion was whether we are going to go back 40 years to the genesis of broadcasting, when there were two or three over-the-air broadcasters, and Shaw, in its form at the time, provided a reach for broadcasters that they could not otherwise have enjoyed.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, there will be a cost. We've been clear on that. You know, this is not the first time we've talked about fee-for-carriage. It was six months ago, I think, that we were in Ottawa in front of the commission talking about fee-for-carriage. A year before that we were in front of the commission.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's duplicate in many forms. Some of the programming is local in origin, but much of the programming is duplicated.